Friday, March 21, 2008

Terrifying Horror Edition, with Caballistics Inc. and the Corpse Delivery Service

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.

Oddly, I didn't enjoy this as much as I was planning to - Gordon Rennie really works out some long-running, slow burn subplots and what seems like it's taking forever when published in sporadic weekly episodes really does satisfy even more when compiled. But while these stories of an occult investigation team in present-day Britain are entertaining, the book is sorely lacking a "story so far" catchup. For example, the book begins with an episode in which an Israeli special forces team shows up to execute a member of Caballistics Inc. for an old war crime, but all of that backstory, much of which I'd forgotten, was explained in the first volume, 2006's Going Underground. People who already enjoy this series will probably really like this book, but a little more work might have been done to make this collected edition more palatable to new readers. Recommended for fans of Hellboy and Necronauts, with hopes for a little more backstory included on new or future editions to make each book stand out a little better.

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service appears monthly in the Japanese anthology Shonen Ace and is written by Eiji Otsuka and drawn by Housui Yamazaki, the creator of the occult thriller Mail. Each of these collected editions - there are six now, from Dark Horse - compiles four episodes of the series, in which five recent college graduates, each with some psychic power, form a company to help the deceased fulfill their final wishes. This usually has them stumbling onto unsolved murders or old conspiracies, and despite a tendency towards villain-of-the-week syndrome, it's done with a good deal of style and wit, in equal measures humorous and creepy. I don't feel like I've gotten to know any of the individual characters yet, though. Recommended.